Whether I’ll be able to will myself into cheering for the Lakers — an organization I loathe from its ownership to its vandyke’d top dog on down (with the exception of Lamar Odom and Luke Walton and, at least in the ’70s, Randy Newman) — is probably even less interesting to you than it is to me, but I’m going to be approaching this series with what I hope will be a more abstracted approach than I brought to my, ah, fair and balanced Spurs coverage from last year’s postseason.

As was the case last year, the Spurs have made their inexorable way through the postseason by stalking and then boring to death two considerably more interesting teams; or, in the case of the Suns, the ghost of the most interesting team of the last decade. As for the Spurs themselves, the team and not what they represent…I sure can’t beat them (seriously: I’m like 6-0, 155), and I will not join them, so I’m going to study them. For as long as I can, at least. That might be a 15-minute stretch before I bounce over to A&E to see if they’re showing re-runs of CSI: Miami (answer: yes, they are, right now) (this is true whenever you read this post), or it might be longer. But I’m going to get to the bottom of my Spurs thing. By which I mean: try to find a reason better than “they’re just…I mean look at them” why I dislike this team so much.

The easy stuff is easy. Bruce Bowen and Robert Horry are cheesy hatchet-men of the lowest order, and everyone knows this. They’re loathsome. And the flopping and googly-eyed beseeching of referees from pretty much everyone else on the team — Brent Barry, Ime Udoka and Jacque Vaughn seem too chilled out for this, and Matt Bonner and Damon Stoudamire barely even get to put on warm-ups anymore — is corny as fuck, too. Again, we all know this. It’s the Spurs, none of this is new, or news, to anyone who’s watched this group manage to somehow make — really, I’m trying to be fair — the most efficient and effective basketball anyone has played in a decade seem totally ugly and unpleasant. So, can I give these guys, this brilliant team, a fair shake?

The short answer is that I’ll keep you posted. The slightly less-short answer is that I doubt it: there is something in me (the kids call it hating; I think it’s some leftover adolescent iconoclasm/contrariness) that resists teams that are anointed as “winners.” The Spurs, to be fair, are not nearly as joyless or aggrieved or hateful as the pre-Super Bowl Patriots; they are, though, every bit as metronomic and predictable and inexorable and…and I hate things like that. Even as I recognize their utility as a sort of abstract standard — any team can beat the Spurs (or any other perfect team) by rebounding and denying open shots and not making mistakes (and making shots) on offense — I just hate things that are inevitable and unbeatable and bigger than human-scale. I think of cancer and climate change and globalization as being like that. I think of basketball as being fun.

The one place where my dislike for the Spurs runs aground is when it comes to Tim Duncan. I want to like Duncan. (Not really, but…fair, that’s the new thing) He seems like a decent guy and is — per a discussion I had with mega-referrer Brendan Flynn the other day — pretty easily either the third- or fourth-most dominant player I’ve seen play in my lifetime. But I keep coming back to a short article I remember from Slate several years ago entitled “Why You Don’t Love Tim Duncan.” Sam Eifling, the piece‘s author, sums it up like so:

[Duncan] attends to the pesky details, tipping unreachable rebounds to teammates and running screens to seal off defenders; and he’s a character guy, more concerned with how he plays than how he looks. In other words, he’s the consummate square, a great example of how discipline, dedication, and noble conduct can triumph over all, which is, speaking on behalf of crass and lazy people everywhere, a truly unendearing thought. Duncan is the kind of athlete your parents would love for you to grow up to be just like, and he’ll probably never live that down.

And I do like Duncan, honestly. Dude likes Call of Duty more than me: okay, fine, the last video game I was actually good at was fucking Karnov. I don’t need to agree with a player’s taste in off-court entertainment to admire their work. I’m certain that Tracy McGrady doesn’t enjoy Erroll Morris’ movies as much as I do, for instance, but I’d still pay a dollar to watch him (McGrady, not Erroll Morris) shoot around. And I know, too, that this truly bizarre (and possibly unknowingly racist, I still can’t tell) post from Bobcats Planet in which Duncan is held up as some brainless hoops robocop — which GC, bless his heart, sent me a week or so ago — is wrong.

Wrong on several counts. For one thing, Adam Morrison is not an intellectual or otherwise socially conscious because he likes Rage Against the Machine and possibly owns this book. For another thing, Adm. James Stockdale is never an acceptable framing device for a blog post or anything else. And finally, it’s wrong in suggesting that Tim Duncan is somehow stupid. He almost certainly isn’t, and he almost certainly is one of the most dominant players I’ll ever get to watch.

And the team he’s on, if I and anyone else can watch them with clear eyes, is almost certainly our era-defining dynasty. So I’m going to try to watch them with clear eyes over the rest of these playoffs, or at least watch them with clearer eyes than I’ve brought to these games in the past. I’m going to try to watch them and really see them. As I wrote earlier, I’ll keep you posted on how that goes (at a shorter length, I promise). But here’s my guess as to what I’ll see, based on what I saw tonight and what I’ve seen leading up to tonight: a team that, fundamentally if not aesthetically, plays blameless, standard-setting basketball. And which I fundamentally cannot avoid blaming for that.

5 Responses to “Getting Used to the Spurs: Year Two (Or So)”

DR — I don’t know if I should thank you for saving me the trouble of writing the same sort of post for another bloggo (except far better than what I’d pump out, w/ far less four-letter action, and w/out calling Argentinian players “EUROPEAN hustle-punks” like the jingo clown I pretend to be), or flip you off for making me remember that Lakers’ season opener w/ Randy Newman playing the three non-negative lines of “I Love LA” in front of Jack & Dyan. Tho I guess that’s every season opener nowadays, isn’t it?

Anyway, I have to disagree w/ your assessment of Udoka — far from being a benign epicenter of chill, he’s an eager little brown-nosing understudy ready to have the team’s ruthless fundamentalism downloaded straight into his noodle. Tho maybe my irrational dislike of his steez stems from the fact that the next time I tell him & Tony Parker apart from a distance will be the first (and only) time.

Also, I can’t believe I haven’t heard anything about Bowen’s playoff-hard throat-chop on The Machine I thought I saw midway through the 2nd / 3rd quarter! I demand justice!

Thank you, sir. Anything I can do to save anyone any work is certainly to my credit, and despite my attempts at modesty, I am eminently willing to accept a pat on the back for not making up new curse-words about the Spurs. I mean, I made them up, but I didn’t put them into print. Yeah, I’m proud of that.

I imagine you’re probably right about Udoka — he’s easy not to notice, and I know is a guy who made it to the NBA a lot later in life than he probably wanted, was never drafted, etc. I want to cut him a break (also, the arm birthmark probably hasn’t been easy to deal with in the one sleeve-free sport), but my guess is that he probably can foresee a fairly long NBA future for himself as a moderately more likable Bruce Bowen, if only he masters Bowen’s dark arts. I don’t know how I’d react if someone told me I could be a multi-millionaire if only I could overcome my natural unwillingness to kick prone opponents and then act like I did no such thing, though. See how fair I’m being?

re Randy Newman — how many teams have a perfectly ironic victory song played over every winning game (and no, CSTB’s many shout outs to Gary Glimmer riffs at sporting events doesn’t count here). True, the number of Laker fans who know “I Love LA” is meant ironically is low, but that’s not the point.

Laker fans are not nearly as intelligent and sophisticated as Cubs fans but I do have to agree with you on the song itself. I Love LA is just a great 80′s song. Randy Newman has denied that the song is ironic or that he hates LA, but he’s been very coy about his intentions. He’s said that he loves all of the over-the-top tackiness about LA. It’s not Born in the USA-ironic but it’s pretty close.